Thread: Recursion in PHP

I'm writing an interpreter for a simple functional programming language of my design. If you've ever used functional programming languages, you know that they use recursion quite frequently, and often the recursion goes rather deep. PHP's call stack is simply not doing the job: stack crashes are happening too often to be tolerable. I know there's no way to make the call stack any bigger, so is there some way I could somehow circumvent it? Some way to maybe simulate recursion without actually making recursive function calls? I'm at a loss here, and I'd appreciate any ideas anyone might have.

What version of PHP are you using? How much memory did you give it?

I'm using PHP 4.3.10. I don't know how much memory it has because I don't have direct access to the server.

Run phpinfo()

Better yet post a link so I can see the PHP info. I think the norm if they have memory limits turned on is 8 MB. This server has no memory limit on PHP. For a normal shared server it's a very good idea to enforce one, so I suspect this may be your problem.

Already have. That's where I got the version. Here: http://nicf.net/phpinfo.php

Hmm, doesn't appear they have the memory limits turned on. Not a good idea for a production box.

What kind of error are you receiving? Be curious to see what it is your doing that is causing such issues.

It's a stack crash. The script just stops. No error message.

Originally Posted by DiffyQ

It's a stack crash. The script just stops. No error message.

Hmm, I've never had that happen and I've been programming PHP for the last 5 years.